Rewards, redemption and expiry

A reward in VivaPoints is two things: a title and a cost. All the design work sits in choosing that cost, deciding how many rewards to list, and knowing what actually happens at the counter when someone claims one.

Write the title for whoever is on shift

The title is what your customer taps and what your staff has to hand over. It should need no interpretation. "Free filter coffee" is a good reward. "Free drink" is not — is a large iced mocha a drink? "15% off" is worse, because now someone is doing arithmetic at the till while three people wait.

Pick things with a low cost to you and a high perceived value: the pastry that would otherwise be thrown out at four o'clock, the add-on shot, the small bag of beans. A reward that costs you 1.20 and feels like 4.00 is a good trade for both sides.

How many rewards, and how far apart

Two to four. One is thin — it gives a customer nothing to aim at once they have claimed it. Ten is a menu, and a menu is a decision, and a decision is where people stop.

Space them so each rung is roughly twice the one below. Carrying on the café from setting up your first program — 10 points per 1 spent, an average visit of 4.00, so 40 points a visit:

The first rung is the one that matters. If nobody can reach it inside two months of normal visiting, the program is decoration. The top rung is allowed to be aspirational — a handful of regulars will get there and they will tell people about it. Setting earn and redeem rates goes deeper into the arithmetic.

What happens when someone claims a reward

Redemption is deliberately a two-step handshake.

1. The customer taps the reward on their card. That creates a pending redemption.
2. The pending redemption appears on your Customers page with a confirm action.
3. One of your staff confirms it as they hand the item over. Only at that moment are the points deducted.

Your Overview has a Redemptions tile counting how many rewards have been claimed, and once points are deducted they stop counting toward Outstanding liability — the tile whose hint reads "Points customers still hold". The counter-side walkthrough is redeeming a reward.

Expiry, honestly

Every program has an expiry policy for points, and the program page shows you which one applies. What the builder does not have is a field for editing it. Today you ask us and we set it for you. That is the whole truth of it, and it is better than pretending a screen exists.

Ask yourself whether you want one at all. Expiry exists to stop Outstanding liability growing forever from people who visited twice in 2024 and are never coming back. That is a real problem for a business with thousands of members, and no problem at all for a salon with two hundred. If your liability number is comfortable, leave the points alone — nothing annoys a returning customer like discovering their balance was quietly emptied.

When you do ask us, the question we will put back to you is how long a customer can go without visiting before their balance lapses. Decide that first, tell your customers it in plain words, and expiry stops being a source of complaints.

If you are changing reward costs on a program people have already joined, read editing a live program before you touch anything.